Month: December 2017

Two final-year Imperial medical students have been acknowledged jointly by the General Medical Council and the Medical Schools Council for their design of a teaching session on professionalism.

Sixth-year MBBS students, Luke Reader and Sam Easdon, created a lesson plan which aims to ‘introduce students to a discussion on honesty and integrity in interactions with peers, colleagues and patients’.

Initially shortlisted, the two were then awarded a runner-up position, claiming one of the top spots from the 97 overall entries to this year’s competition.

The lesson suggests beginning by asking students, ‘What is honesty and integrity to you?’, and facilitating a discussion encouraging students to reflect on their personal definitions of these themes. (more…)

Scientific conferences are an essential mechanism for the communication of scientific findings, career networking and collaboration. However, there is no formal training for conferences and opportunities to attend such meetings are often strictly limited due to their high cost.

Therefore, to help students within the Division of Infectious Diseases (DID) acquire conference experience, a PhD Student Away Day was organised with funding support from the supplies company Qiagen. The event took place on 30 November 2017 at LT2 Wolfson Education Centre, Hammersmith Campus.

In total 85 students attended the day, including participants from each Section within DID based on four campuses. To create the atmosphere of a student-led conference, the only academics present were Professor Charles Bangham (Head, DID), Principle Investigators who voted for the best presentation and poster, and co-organisers Dr Sophie Helaine and Dr Nathalie MacDermott. This helped to ensure that students were able to ask questions and lead discussions, which can sometimes be dominated by senior academics at national or international conferences. (more…)

Posted on behalf of the Royal College of Surgeons

The Royal College of Surgeons has just launched an independent Commission to explore the future of surgical care.

The purpose of the Commission on the Future of Surgery will be to set out a compelling and credible vision of the future advances in medicine and technology, and how those developments will affect the delivery of surgical care.

In the last 50 years, new findings and innovations have transformed surgery and the way clinical care is delivered. Innovations that were unthinkable only a few decades or years ago are now common practice.

To reduce surgical trauma on the patient, surgery has moved towards ever less invasive interventions, with fewer but more precise cuts and incisions. Surgery is thus shifting from traditionally seeing, feeling and manipulating organs and tissues through the surgeon’s own eyes and hands, to using an intelligent robotic medium to see and intervene inside the body. (more…)

The College will be implementing a new availability and absence management system, called TeamSeer. The system has been designed to record and manage staff availability such as holiday, sickness and other absence types required by the College. The system has been piloted across the College, and feedback has been gathered to ensure it meets the College requirements.

The go-live date for the new system will be in time for the new annual leave year on 1 February 2018.

The system is a user-friendly online planner, which will be accessible using your College username and password. When the system goes live, you will receive an email from TeamSeer with a link that will give you access to your account. In the meantime, if you would like to familiarise yourself with the system you can view video tutorials at the weblinks below: (more…)